Risk Management

When considering the industry’s take on risk management, one of the arrows in the quiver is something called personal minimums. One idea behind personal minimums is that the FAA’s regulations are minimum standards—we’re free to exceed them: If VFR requires three miles and 1000 feet, why not bump that up to five miles and 2000 […]

The pilot of a King Air C90 that went into a spin while skydivers prepared to jump over South Africa on Oct. 14 says the plane departed controlled flight because too many jumpers got out of the rear exit at the same time. The dramatic video of the incident has gone viral and been featured on […]

A Denver pilot says he’s successfully tested an app that can detect drones that might conflict with aircraft. Drone Traffic CEO Rick Zelenka said the test was conducted at Platte Valley Airport in Hudson, Colorado, and was the result of a NASA-funded contract to develop a drone detection system for aircraft. “It spots a drone and […]

Circadian rhythm is the daily alteration in a person’s behavior and physiology controlled by an internal biological clock in the brain. Body temperature, melatonin levels, cognitive performance, alertness levels, and sleep patterns are all subject to our circadian rhythm. A circadian challenge refers to the difficulty of operating in opposition to an individual’s normal circadian […]

Over the years, I’ve cancelled several planned flights, answering the go/no-go question in the negative. Many other flights got rescheduled and were completed—either earlier or later than the original plan—while only a handful were attempted but never completed, at least not in keeping with the original plan. Weather has been the most frequent reason for […]

When I bought my Debonair from its previous owners, it had the original factory lap belts installed. As someone who had been flying airplanes equipped with three-point harnesses, it felt very exposed to be zooming around in something almost three times as fast as the car I drove to the airport but without even a […]

A shipment of Moderna COVID-19 vaccines to Bhutan was shaken and stirred after an unorthodox approach and landing at Paro in the high mountainous country. The Intra Asia Boeing 737-300 freighter departed Kolkata, India, last Tuesday for Paro and someone on the flight deck shot cellphone video that’s lit up aviation forums. The Aviation Herald […]

Night had fallen outside my approach control. I was settling into my chair in the radar room when Center handed me a Cessna 172. Remarks showed it was an IFR training flight to one of our Class D satellite airports. I checked the time. That airport’s tower was closing momentarily. We routinely ran non-towered ops […]

We all know—or should know—that an airplane’s wing stalls at its critical angle of attack. While that value varies from plane to plane and wing to wing, once that value is exceeded, the stall occurs, every time. What happens next depends on a variety of factors, including aerodynamic loading, attitude, bank angle, power and control […]

Aviation is a numbers-oriented activity. Sure; we can more or less safely operate an aircraft by disregarding some of them, but if we intend to aviate with some degree of reliability and repeatability—not to mention professionalism—we need to do it precisely, which means using some metric against which to measure our performance and the airplane’s. […]